The BCNDP and the "Third Way"

Yes and dogmatic ideologies have proven a booming success. 

You mention that if one leads people will follow. IMO that is an out dated axiom, for now.  People want a responsive political process that represents them.  They do not want, or need, to be followers or at the least it is what is best for everyone. Citizen should take the lead and government should follow in a responsible manner.  Following "leaders" has lead humanity down the wrong path too many times. We need responsive, pragmatic and progressive governors not charismatic leaders.

The third way is not about reactionary policies or trending either left or right. It is about a synthesis of the best of all ideas and using the one's that produce the best outcome for the most people. That could be as radical as marrying a GAI to a flat tax at the domestic level or pursing a gold standard, Tobin tax and fair trade at the international level. It could also be as pedestrian as reducing the tax burden on small business or investing in forestry. It could mean nationalizing Tersan while at the same time as privatizing another service. It would depend on the predicated outcome.

In fact the idea of fair trade is a perfect example of third way beliefs. It rejects both protectionism and free markets for a synthesis of ensuring that the market place is a level playing field in all areas.  It may be best summed up as a belief in equality of oppurtunity over an equality of outcome but really meaning it and ensuring it.

Sorry nbeltov I do not believe that for a moment....

I'm not getting a better idea of third way from these posts -- it still sounds vacuous to me.  I don't see how fair trade, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton have anything in common. 

Fair trade, IMO, is decidedly left and something the NDP should fully support.  Interestingly, in a segment of the business community fair trade and organically grown go hand in hand -- oh, if only policies that were socially progressive and environmentally friendliness could be meaningfully embraced by the NDP instead of this suspect "third way."

The NDP do fully support fair trade....also of organically grown food...and environmentally friendliness...

OK, so how does this have anything to do with the policies of Blair or Clinton who are supposed to be third way? 

It would make more sense to compare apples with apples ie. Blair and Clinton, with Layton not James. The Clintons are Liberal Democrats who basically enabled the neoliberal financial regime in the US with deregulation and furthered the globalization agenda. Liberal democrats are not social democrats. In fact, it was the Clinton Liberal democrats who signed the very neoliberal NAFTA deal with our own Liberal stooges of finance and big business in 1993 and enacted by 1994.

Liberals are on the sidelines looking in in most rich countries excluding the five English-speaking western ones, and it's because there are better and more democratic alternatives. We've really got to modernize our electoral systems in English-speaking countries where neoliberalism is not so much different from religious fundamentalism.

The federal NDP has been viewed as having been the conscience party for the Liberals. Liberal Democrats in England, otoh, are said the be campaigning to the left of British Labour. By comparison, Canada's Liberals have not budged from the their very neoliberalist platform since Trudeau's last months in power. Apparently being the conscience party wasn't working for the NDP. And so Jack Layton has vowed to take the party to the left of "middle way" where Audrey McLaughlin took the party in the 90s. And we've done nothing but gain seats every election since Jack became leader. It's a positive result for the left in Canada.

As for BC and all provincial NDP, what else can they do besides balance budgets and stave off the privatization bogey? Our obsolete FPTP system is what drives provincial parties to campaign on a narrow four-year performance criteria for running the province like a business. The people who do vote just aren't looking at the big picture when deciding who to vote for. Most never heard of Keynes, but they expect NDP governments to be as fiscally responsible as the CCF were over five terms in power in Saskatchewan. And what many don't realize is that it's the political and economic landscape has been re-shaped in Ottawa over the last 30 years. It's not the 1950's or even 1970's anymore in Canada. Certain things have changed, and the federal NDP opposed those changes that would affect the rest of Canada every step of the way.

I think that for some of us there is nothing to be gained by simply balancing budgets CCF-style and staving off privatization agendas under Liberal and Tory governments at provincial levels. They don't explain, however,  how opposing deregulation and privatization is perceived by them to be the same as neoliberal agenda, a political-economic agenda which the NDP is trying to oppose in this country.  It even sounds like they would prefer it. It's either that or they don't really understand where neoliberal comes from or what we actually have to do to stop it least of all reverse it. They spend more time criticizing provincial NDP governments than attacking the wolf's lair of neoliberalism itself, which is Ottawa. They tend to get lost in the rhubarb when it comes to that discussion.

For using reason and logic, Moe, you are not doing very well. How can you compare domestic policy in the UK to that of Canada, especially considering that health care is largely a provincial responsibility? Where are you comparing from? Health care is uneven across Canada and it is uneven across regions in provinces. Your use of one faulty example doesn't make a case. Second, what do you mean by history being kinder to Clinton? Are we talking about the same person who let incarceration rates rise, pulled out social programs letting many Americans sink and saw the rise of informal labour? His legacy may very well be the opposite of your claim given that this so-called "third-way" president did such great damage to social welfare after 12 years of Reagan and G.W. Bush.

Yes, but you are treating it as if the Federal Government has absolute control over these processes. The state is not the autonomous unit that enacts these policies and allows the process of neoliberalism to occur. NAFTA was a response to deal with capitalism's previous crisis. States do not tame capital; in fact, your example shows the state succumbing to the interests of capital by relaxing labour laws as to make the supply of labour more flexible.

I can't believe that you are so pissed with the right that you are blinded by what Florida's proposal IS. This is the very reason that cities are trying to put in bike lanes and street make-overs and attract university grads - they want to attract a different kind of capital than what is being attracted already. The creative class are the new wonderful, flexible labour force that will use their creativity to generate wealth with R&D, or maybe they will endeavour into entrepreneurialism. How can you cry foul on anti-labour laws and then promote this knowing that it is the product of the very things you dislike?

Fidel, the Ontario Liberals are actually underfunding programs like universities as we speak. This practice of building is on items that are "prudent": infrastructure, which is useful in allowing capital to work efficiently high return (infrastructure projects). Meanwhile, operational budgets are slashed as universities look for private investments to operate their beautiful, shiny new infrastructure and technology. This is part of neoliberalism: streamlining state funding by spending money where profitable (infrastructure) and avoiding risky or low rates of returns (e.g., welfare, operational budgets of healthcare and education). That you liken McGuinty to an opportunist is your call, but his practices can be neoliberal without making him a neoliberal, and you should be able to say that if you want to.

I cannot stress enough that this is not some sort of personal conspiracy amongst politicians but a process that is reshaping our economies and societies. Even you have internalized neoliberalism by the very subscription to Richard Florida's ideas. 

I never said that I was advocating end of history theory, please show me where I did?

I did state that for the time being we are in a state of capitalism and that we should play the cards that we are dealt.

You can't change the game from the outside.

The power to pursue economic growth policies has been ceded to Bay Street and bondsalesmen. In Linda McQuaig's book, The Cult of Impotence, she describes the general finance situation for governments as explained by Canadian economist Pierre Fortin. Fortin goes on to say that, yes, international markets are powerful. British Labour, for example, blinked in the late 1970's and chose not to challenge markets threatening Britain with capital flight if they maintained the road they were on, which Sir Tony Benn also adds that Labour was probably on their way to controlling inflation and unemployment anyway. But they blinked under the threat of the new liberal financial regime at the time, which was actually focused on waging a psychological war on Britain then to make an example of. Neoliberal ideologues in the US had no idea whether British Labour would knuckle under to to market diktats then. But that's not McQuaig and something else altogether.

What Pierre Fortin describes is that, yes, the new liberal financial regime of the mide to late 1970's caused governments to surrender control over capital flows inward and outward - but it also handed federal governments another choice for policy autonomy. And that is to choose between protecting external values of the currency, or to pursue pro growth expansionary policies with the first favouring bondholders,  and the latter, working people. And she goes on to explain the policy options:

It's interesting to note that the US has been the only country able to defy Mundell-Fleming thesis through its dollar hegemony, Or at least it has until now. China is another country that is probably now able to defy the thesis and is capable of freeing itself from US dollar hegemony. In fact, they choose to maintain a low currency to aid China's export economy and much to the chagrin of neoliberal ideologues everywhere.

So the new liberal international financial system did not have to spell the end of of the power of governments. We simply need a government willing to pursue the interests of Canadians over those of bay Street bond salesmen and those who buy them. Fortin says the threat of capital flight is a bluff, and that governments could flex their muscles if they chose to. And he goes on to explain why Canada and other governments are in a better position to challenge capital than our own governments let on. The political impotence is entirely of the self-imposed variety. I think Jack is the perfect leader to understand how to go about pursuing democratic choices. He did a PhD in international capital flows.

I like the idea of doing something more than nothing about Canada's $130 billion dollar infrastructure deficit. I don't think there is a very good case for public-private partnerships or even for the Ontario Liberals version of P3's, private financial procurements. Governments and the millions of taxpayers will tend to always be able to borrow money for less than it costs private enterprise.

McGuinty's Liberals have created a fair number of public sector jobs through this trouble. That's not very neoliberal of them at all. Although I suspect they've contemplated re-election chances over and above whatever ideology they tend to follow. They flip-flopped with their previous stance on deregulation of Ontario Hydro and now stalled on nuclear expansion. I think they made a lot of promises since 2003 and broken a lot of them. I could never support them. They aren't much different from Harris-Eves neolibs as my net overall assessment of them.

My reading of neoliberalism isn't from Keynesian macroeconomics, so I don't know how much of a debate we can have. I think you are overprivileging the power of government to regulate capital. It is a system in inherent crisis that experts *think* they can control along with the population and territory. Further, anytime someone imposes their expert knowledge on the public stating that they know how 'better' it becomes very easy for government to become anti-democratic - unless your hope is to indoctrinate the public with Keynesian thought.

So the one of the answers to deficit is to attract a highly-mobile, flexible labour group to regions that create business-friendly policies to attract mobile capital? It is a response to neoliberalization and an affirmation of neoliberalism, not an acknowledgement of its problems. As I said, the logic is internalized.

Fortin is a conservative economist and explained how the new liberal financial model actually took one set of policy options away from government but handed them another since the transition from a more or less Keynesian monetary agreement between countries to what we have today, which is neoliberalism more or less and now bankrupt more than it is made solvent by perverse upside-down socialist methods to float it. And there are conservative economists recommending today that the financial system be a made public utility for the public good. Every form of capitalism has inherent contradictions which eventually cause a structural crisis of that type of capitalism. And there are regions of the world that are now challenging the capitalist institutions of finance.

Alan Greenspan the Friedmanite wizard working behind the curtain of neoliberal machinery in the US admitted to Carl Levin and Congressional oversight committee on the financial collapse that his view of the way the world works was deeply flawed. The plunge protection team has been working behind the scenes for many years to prevent the inevitable and betraying the lie of leave it to the market financial capitalism. Yes, there are alternatives to the failing neoliberal financial order, and there will be a revolution in economic theory over the next ten years while this one is scrapped along the way. Things are not looking good for the Hayekian-Friedman view of the world. The fact that capitalism has collapsed in various experiments around the world since 14th century Italy should be an indication that the world should be searching for a model that does work. Neoliberalism has been proven incompatible with democracy since Richard Nixon rejected Friedman's ideas in the 1970's and were rejected by Chileans by 1985 as they no longer feared bullets of government soldiers in favour of protest in the streets.

This is the way it is at provincial levels of economy in Canada, Balkanized since CUSFTA, NAFTA, MAI, GATS, and a lack of political will in Ottawa to collect federal tax revenues at even the OECD average level as a percentage of GDP. The impotence of the new laissez-faire is all in their minds. The struggle for democracy continues.

I should have clarified I was referring to the Mundell-Fleming thesis, not Fortin...

I don't doubt that these policies are disciplining leaders into thinking that they are stuck with few options, especially as they are trying to manage a state with reduced resources. Still, the pressure also comes from citizens who internalize liberalism's logic to stay out of the private sphere of the market. The struggle for democracy is about pushing neoliberalism out of our lives on multiple scales, not just at the national level. Neoliberalism is inconsistent with equity and as a project it has produced social insecurity and fear and a loss of a sense of socially just outcomes in our cities.